Should You Bank Your Own Blood? Actually, Yeah

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Should You Bank Your Own Blood? Actually, Yeah

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.